Conducting a survey about political visual perception is a strange experience.
You hand someone a printed sheet, ask them to look at a poster that contains no party logo, no candidate name, no policy position – just three words and a design – and you watch them immediately, confidently, place it somewhere on a political spectrum. Often within seconds. Sometimes with a short laugh of recognition. Occasionally with mild suspicion about what exactly they were being asked to participate in.
The speed of those responses was itself one of the most telling outcomes of the survey.
Participants in Graz were shown a series of design variations of the same slogan – Zusammenhalt. Sicherheit. Zukunft. – each presenting identical text through different combinations of colour and typography. The question was simple: does this feel more liberally or more conservatively coded? No definitions were offered. No political parties were named. The visual impression alone was meant to do the work.
And it largely did.
Colour produced the most consistent and immediate responses. Across participants, certain colour associations proved remarkably stable, tracking closely with the conventions of Austrian and broader Central European political visual culture. Blue designs were frequently and confidently read as conservative. Red designs were placed toward the left. These associations did not require hesitation or analytical effort – they were simply recognised, in the way that long-repeated visual conventions tend to be. Murray Edelman’s argument that political symbols gain meaning through emotional conditioning rather than rational decoding held up well in practice (Edelman, 1964). Respondents were not reasoning about colour. They were remembering it.
This is particularly interesting in the Austrian context, where party colour associations are unusually consolidated. The Social Democrats are red. The People’s Party is turquoise, historically black. The Freedom Party uses blue. The Greens are green. These associations are reinforced across decades of election campaigns, newspaper coverage and street-level political communication. By the time a resident of Graz encounters a blue political poster, the ideological suggestion arrives before the text does.
The survey results confirmed this. Colour functioned as the dominant visual cue. When colour was strongly coded – a deep red, a saturated blue – participants responded quickly and consistently. When colour was more ambiguous – softer tones, less conventionally political palettes – responses became less uniform and more dependent on typography.
This hierarchy of cues is itself rather revealing.
It suggests that in the visual grammar of political communication, colour operates as the primary signal and typography as the secondary one. You read the colour first, even if you do not know you are reading it. Typography then either confirms or complicates that initial impression.
What the survey could not fully disentangle, given its modest scale, was how much of this response reflects genuine visual literacy and how much reflects the particular saturation of colour-party association within Austrian media culture. Would the same results emerge in a context where party colour conventions are less established, or more contested? That question remains open.
But in Graz, in the summer of this survey, the colours did exactly what decades of political branding had trained them to do.
They spoke before the words could.
Sources:
- Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
- Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
- Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
